ABSTRACT
At the beginning of the 1980s, the Danish economy was in deep crisis and, for the first time since before the war, unemployment was becoming a serious problem. Denmark’s export trade was far slacker than its import trade-in spite of vigorous attempts to sell its off-the-shelf housing units abroad! Mass social housing estates in and around Denmark’s main cities, Copenhagen, Aarhus, Odense, and Aalborg, were proving hard to let, hard to manage and costly. Boosting owner-occupation had diverted savings into more and more expensive housing, rather than into more productive investment. Popular, private flats with low rents for the standard of accommodation were still rapidly disappearing, and many of the poorest households, previously occupying the oldest and cheapest inner-city units, were being squeezed out into the low-demand mass housing estates. In the 1970s, small but not insignificant numbers of immigrant workers had come into Denmark and, by 1984, 2 per cent of the population comprised foreigners. This growing minority population, previously concentrated in the inner-city tenements, began to spread out and become more conspicuous. Racial tensions rose as Denmark’s homogeneity was threatened. Housing management was stretched to its limits. The government acted in four ways: changes in support for owner-occupation; the development of private co-operatives; changes in private renting in urban renewal areas; and changes in social housing.
